The Feijoada was great - it will taste even better over the next couple of days. Watched an episode of Bones and spent a bunch of time working in the radio room and the garage.
Preparing to build a largish antenna for my high-frequency unit - this is the big one and can contact other stations worldwide when the propagation is good. With a crappy small antenna I have reliably talked with people on the East coast, Canada, Mexico and as far as Hawaii and Japan. I am situated in a valley that runs North/South so direct line of sight to places East and West are limited but I have still been able to get out.
My other setup is Ultra high frequency - these terms were coined 60 years ago when getting a stable transmitter to run at fifty million cycles per second (50 Mega Hertz) was a real art. Now, my UHF rig runs up to over 400 MHz without breaking a sweat. The UHF rigs are great for local contacts and there are powerful repeaters set up all through the Puget Sound area where I can reach out with a modest system and broadcast over a 300 mile radius. Again, local contacts but this is what you want for most of the emergency communications networks.
Postlude - in which this sysop goes a bit off-topic:
The Hertz designation comes from Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who was the first person to conclusively prove the existence of electromagnetic waves theorized by James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light. Hertz proved the theory by engineering instruments to transmit and receive radio pulses using experimental procedures that ruled out all other known wireless phenomena. The unit of frequency – cycle per second – was named the "Hertz" in his honor.
One of my major heroes is Nikola Tesla - an absolute genius who is unfortunately unknown by many people. He has a few inventions that you may be aware of - fluorescent lighting, the system we use today of three-phase electrical power generation and distribution (including the 110/220/440 volts and the 60 Hz. frequency), the alternating current motor, radio (demonstrated in 1898 before Marconi got his dots across the Atlantic ocean in 1901), X-Rays (he stopped experimenting with them because he and his assistants were getting burns - Tesla published in 1894, Wilhelm Röntgen in 1896). That kind of stuff.
Needless to say, he went head to head with Thomas Edison quite a lot - Edison was the archetype of today's patent trolls - he would purchase a promising technology and then market it.
I love it that the universal term-of-art for the strength of a magnet is one Tesla. For measuring frequency, we use Hertz. For current, Ampere and voltage is named after Alesandro Volta. There is no measurement using an Edison out there. For all of Thomas Edison's fame and glory, his name is not used for anything. His role in history is that of a clever marketer and not a true scientist.
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